Noseless newborn

Before Eli Thompson was born in Mobile, Alabama, U.S., his father joked that he hoped he wouldn't pass on his nose to his new son. Little did he expect that the child would be born with no nose whatsoever. Eli has a rare condition known as complete congenital arhinia and underwent a tracheotomy at 5 days of age. Surgeons will not be able to construct his nasal passageways until he is past puberty, but in his mother Brandi McGlathery's words, "We think he's fine the way he is."

HvS
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article17237756.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article17237756.html#storylink=chWe think he's perfect the way he is

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Flaying frogs

It was in 1987 that a lawsuit brought by 15-year-old Jenifer Graham of Victorville, California, U.S., resulted in several states offering an alternative to the dissection of frogs in science class. But for many middle school students, it is still a rite of passage and for good reason, according to David Evans, Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association. Not only does the anatomy extrapolate to the human body, but it's hands-on: "There's something visceral and important about the real thing. What does this particular organ feel like? How stiff is it? Is it compressible?"

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Dentures from the dead

To meet the 19th c. European demand for dentures, the mouths of men killed in battle were plundered for their teeth. The human teeth were more valuable and longer-lasting than those carved from elephant, walrus, or hippopotamus ivory. Dentists made no bones about where the teeth were harvested, advertising them as "Waterloo teeth" or "Waterloo ivory," and guaranteed that they came from young, healthy soldiers rather than buried corpses or executed criminals. A British plunderer named Butler openly wished for a huge battle, boasting “there’ll be no want of teeth, I’ll draw them as fast as the men are knocked down.” He was half right, as the business turned to imports from the American Civil War.

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Fetuses in fetu

Fetus in fetu is a developmental abnormality in which a mass resembling a fetus (IMAGE ABOVE) develops within the body. According to one theory the growth is a mature teratoma (a kind of tumor), but according to another theory it begins as a normal fetus but is absorbed by its own twin within the womb. The condition has been documented 200 times in the medical literature, but the case reported in the Hong Kong Medical Journal, in which a Chinese baby was born in 2010 containing two fetuses of its own, is a little atypical. The authors write:

In our case, both the twin parasitic fetuses had body weights, sizes, and fetal structures that corresponded well with a gestational age of 10 weeks. A normal ultrasound during the early antenatal period rather suggests that they might have been tiny parasitic fetuses that had grown slowly with the ‘patient’ and reached their significant sizes at term, instead of the popular theory of early normal development followed by parasitic inclusion and arrest of growth. Although with limited antenatal documentation, our case report does not support the popular monozygotic multiple pregnancy theory, and favours, by default, the traditional classification into a teratoma.

But of course the popular media is blaring headlines about a baby born pregnant with twins.

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His hysterectomy

A 37-year-old businessman from Lancashire, U.K., has been discovered to have a fully functioning womb. An MRI scan performed because he was suspected of having bladder cancer revealed a complete set of female reproductive organs. Doctors believe the man has persistent Mullerian duct syndrome (PMDS), a rare intersex condition usually diagnosed at birth or at puberty. Rather stupefied, he exclaims, "The diagnosis came as a bombshell. I’ve never seen myself as anything but an ordinary bloke who has a normal sex life. I was shocked when the consultant said I had a fully functioning set of women’s reproductive organs, and I was even having periods. It appears I could even potentially get pregnant. But I’ve been told by doctors I’ll be having a hysterectomy in the next few weeks. Bizarrely, that could lead to menopause.”

 

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Not-so-gross anatomy

General Electric has developed and field-tested a new, superfast scanner called Revolution CT at Florida's West Kendall Baptist Hospital that allows doctors to obtain high-resolution images of blood vessels, soft tissue, organs, and bones. The machine, which exposes patients to only a low dose of radiation, can image the hard within a single heartbeat. Hospital CEO Javier Hernández-Lichtl proclaims, "The advanced design definitely makes for a less intimidating, more comfortable patient experience, while yielding amazingly accurate and detailed images.” (FOLLOW LINK FOR STILL AND MOVING IMAGES)

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Cortex context

Resident pathologist Coleman de Chenar began amassing a collection of brains in the 1950s at what was then called the Texas State Lunatic Asylum. By the time he died in 1985, he had 200 specimens in glass jars, each of which was labeled with a reference number, the condition from which the patient suffered (described in Latin), and his or her date of death. The asylum, by then renamed the Austin State Hospital, found a home for the collection at the University of Texas and transferred the brains in 1987. They were housed in an air-conditioned storage closet at the Animal Resources Center. The curator of the collection, UT neuroscientist Tim Schallert, was asked by the center’s then-director Jerry Fineg in the mid-1990s to move half of the collection to make space. But when Schallert undertook the task, he found that only 100 brains remained and that Fineg did not remember clearly what he had done with them. Says Schallert of the lost brains – which include that of UT mass murderer Charles Whitman, "I never found out exactly what happened—whether they were just given away, sold or whatever—but they just disappeared.” The mystery of the missing brains is now a book by photographer Adam Voorhees and journalist Alex Hannaford. Happily, what is one of the strangest brains in the world is still preserved in the existing collection.

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Thymus time

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have grown from scratch, for the first time, a whole functional organ inside an animal. The organ was a thymus (IMAGE ABOVE), a critical part of the immune system found near the heart; the animal was a laboratory mouse; and "scratch" was genetically reprogrammed cells mixed with other support-role cells. Inside the animal, the bunch of cells developed into a functional thymus that produced the T-cells necessary for a healthy immune system. Obstacles to be overcome before this could be used as a human therapy include tissue-matching and ensuring that transplant cells do not pose a cancer risk by growing uncontrollably. Human blood vessels, windpipes and bladders have been grown, but in the lab on a scaffold seeded with a patient's own cells and then implanted. About this latest achievement, team member Clare Blackburn declares, "This is a very exciting advance and it's also very tantalizing in terms of the wider field of regenerative medicine."

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Lord of Patients

In the church of San Bartolo Cuautlalpan in Zumpango, Mexico, stands a somewhat frightening, life-size, 300-year-old sculpture known as the "Lord of Patience." Until now, the lifelike statue of Christ has only left the church once a year to tour the town on Easter, but has now been removed to the National Institute of Anthropology and History to be restored. During that process, researchers have discovered that it has real human teeth (X-RAY HERE, VIDEO HERE). Because they had not been set apart in a separate shrine, it is highly unlikely that they are the relics of a saint. Instead it is assumed that the teeth were offered by a member of the church, since Mexican parishioners were known to have volunteered their hair and clothing for the creation of realistic statuary. Fanny Unikel, director of the School of Restoration, Conservation and Museology, points out, "It is common that the sculptures have teeth, but they are usually made ​​of wood or bone carved individually or as a plate, but this case has eight teeth of an adult, you can even see to the root. The teeth were probably donated as a token of gratitude. It's the first time human teeth have been found in a sculpture."

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Ben's bones

The title of this post does not refer to the bones of American statesman Benjamin Franklin (he died and was buried in Philadelphia), but to the bones discovered buried in the basement of the London house he lived in from 1757 to 1775. As ambassador for the American colonies, he occupied an elegant 4-story Georgian house at No. 36 Craven Street. Friends of Benjamin Franklin House raised money to convert the building into a museum in 1998, by which time it had become dilapidated. A construction worker was the first to discover skeletal remains in a pit in a windowless basement room. Excavation revealed some 1,200 pieces of bone, representing the remains of 10 bodies, 6 of them children – and they would have been deposited while Franklin was in residence. Because the bones bore the marks of a saw, a scalpel, and a drill, it was deduced that these were not murder victims but subjects of anatomical study by Ben's friend William Hewson. "Researchers think that 36 Craven was an irresistible spot for Hewson to establish his own anatomy lab. The tenant was a trusted friend, the landlady was his mother-in-law, and he was flanked by convenient sources for corpses. Bodies could be smuggled from graveyards and delivered to the wharf at one end of the street, or snatched from the gallows at the other end."

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Visibility of vermin

In a technique that removes lipids, which make tissue opaque, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have succeeded in rendering the skin of dead rats and mice invisible. Transparency will allow researchers to study nerve connections, organ systems, and other anatomical structures without having to slice the specimens up. After a hydrogel is injected to replace the supporting structure, the lipids can be flushed out with detergent. A much quicker process than immersion, PARS – perfusion-assisted agent release in situ – takes 1 week to complete on a mouse and 2 weeks on a rat. In response to whether the process could be used to prepare a human cadaver, American biologist and lead author Viviana Gradinaru says, "As long as you have a preserved circulatory system, the method is scalable, In theory it could."

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Bulbous baldness

I have been waiting years for the opportunity to blog about this! I learned decades ago that some people cure their baldness by having a balloon inserted under the skin with hair follicles to stretch it so that the bald area can be cut away and the stretched skin stitched in its place. When I began Quigley's Cabinet in 2008, I tried to research this, but the search string I used was wrong. Thanks to an article in the weird news, I now know it is called "scalp expansion surgery." Chris Stoyanov, a 30-year-old who lives in Worthing, U.K., spent years as a teenager undergoing multiple surgeries to remove a tumor, which left areas of scarring and skin grafts that would never grow hair. To remedy this situation, his plastic surgeon Niall Kirkpatrick gradually expanded a balloon beneath Stoyanov's scalp to its maximum of 950ml – grapefruit-sized (IMAGE ABOVE). Dr. Kirkpatrick reports, “I know that it was a pretty tough six months for Chris but it is great to see his self confidence as restored as his hairline.”

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In a twist

In a case that merited mention in The New England Journal of Medicine, a 48-year-old Italian man sustained some major injuries in a motorcycle accident. He had broken his ribs, punctured his lungs, and ruptured spleen. But the strange thing was that his heart – along with the pulmonary artery and aorta – twisted 90° to the right. The buildup of air in the pleural cavity rather then the twisting of his body in the accident caused the dextrocardia, as it is called, which then reversed itself. Doctors Andrea Colli and Enrico Petranzan of the University of Padua write, "A total of 24 hours after pleural drainage, the patient's heart moved leftward, back into its original position, with complete anatomical and physiological recovery of the great vessels and other areas. A follow-up echocardiogram and CT scan did not show the presence of any relevant anatomical disruption of the heart, vessel tears, heart-valve dysfunction, or impairment of cardiac contractility caused by the previous rotation of the heart."

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Period poop

When an urban renewal project in Namur, Belgium, unearthed latrines dating back to the 14th c. beneath the city square, researchers jumped at the opportunity to analyze fossilized human feces. And a team of French scientists has made a momentous discovery, given what we know now about the importance of probiotics in the human gut. They have found viruses containing genes for antibiotic resistance from a period long before antibiotics were used in medicine. The viruses are bacteriophages (PHOTO HERE), which keep the population of good and bad bacteria in check. Though they differ taxonomically, most of the viral sequences the researchers found in the ancient stool are related to viruses currently known to infect bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. Corresponding author of the study Christelle Desnues of Aix Marseille Université writes, "Our evidence demonstrates that bacteriophages represent an ancient reservoir of resistance genes and that this dates at least as far back as the Middle Ages."

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Imperfection

"For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it," wrote 1st c. B.C.E. Roman architect Vitruvius. When Leonardo da Vinci put this idea to paper during the Renaissance, his now famous image of the perfect proportionality of the human body (ABOVE) became known as Vitruvian Man. Symbolically, Vitruvian Man was intended to represent a microcosm of the universe, depicting the human form as the bridge between the terrestrial and the celestial. But it turns out that this "perfect" person is not so perfect after all. Based on the bulge just above the left side of his groin, Hutan Ashrafian, a lecturer of surgery at Imperial College London, has diagnosed Vitruvian Man with an inguinal hernia. Two American doctors concur: Jeffrey Young, director at the University of Virginia’s Trauma Center, and Michael Rosen, director of the Comprehensive Hernia Center at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Ohio, who comments, “If it isn’t a hernia then I really have no idea what it would be.”

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Seeing stars

After an on-the-job accident, a 42-year-old male electrician developed star-shaped cataracts in his eyes. Unfortunately, the 14,000-volt jolt of electricity which caused the strange formations also took away most of his sight. Within 4 weeks, his vision had decreased to the perception of hand motions. He was treated by clinical ophthalmologist Bobby S. Korn of the University of California, San Diego, who photographed the "bilateral stellate anterior subcapsular opacities of the lens" (IMAGES ABOVE, TOP) and "scattered cotton-wool spots and bilateral optic-nerve pallor" (IMAGES ABOVE, BOTTOM). Dr. Korn removed the cataracts and implanted an intraocular lens 4 months after injury and repaired a detached retina in the left eye 2 years later. Now, 10 years after the electrocution, the patient's visual acuity was better in the right eye than the left and both optic nerves had atrophied. Although legally blind, the California man can get around independently on public transportation and read with the use of low-vision aids. Dr. Korn explains, "The optic nerve is similar to any wire that conducts electricity. In this case, the extreme current and voltage that passed through this important natural wire caused damage to the optic nerve itself."

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Long lost ligament

In 1879, a French surgeon postulated that an additional ligament existed on the anterior of the human knee. Only now, after a broad cadaver study using macroscopic dissection techniques, have Belgian orthopedic surgeons proved the French doctor right. Steven Claes and Johan Bellemans of University Hospitals Leuven have identified the anterolateral ligament or ALL (IMAGE ABOVE) as a critical component in episodes where the knees of patients who have had their ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) repaired give way. The researchers write, “The ALL was found to be a distinct ligamentous structure at the anterolateral aspect of the human knee with consistent origin- and insertion-site features. Given its structure and anatomic location, the ALL is hypothesized to control internal tibial rotation and thus to affect the pivot shift phenomenon, although further studies are needed to investigate its biomechanical function.”

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Water on the brain

On the cover of Rosamond Purcell's incredible book Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, is her photograph of the skeleton of a child with hydrocephalus whose skull has "opened like a flower." Without treatment, the condition – in which cerebrospinal fluid fills the cavities of the brain causing intracranial pressure – is fatal. The remedy is to drain the fluid with a shunt but that may not be affordable in developing countries. Such is the predicament of Abdul Rehman of Tripura, India, whose daughter Runa's hydrocephalus has gone untreated because he makes the equivalent of a mere $2.75 a day. "Day by day, I saw her head growing too big after she was born. It's very difficult to watch her in pain. I pray several times a day for a miracle -- for something to make my child better," he says. The head of the 16-month-old child now has a circumference of 36" (91cm) and she likely won't live very much longer (PHOTOS HERE – CAUTION). She certainly has brain damage, and likely suffers from seizures and blindness, among other symptoms. Her photos are now making the rounds in the weird news, but even if the publicity results in donations, it is too late for treatment. Draining off the fluid at this point will probably cause her brain to bleed or collapse.

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Phocomelia phantom

Perhaps the most famous example of a person born with phocomelia is Mignon the Penguin Girl, who toured in circus sideshows in the early 20th c. Phocomelia is a condition – caused by thalidomide (before it was taken off the market) or by genetic inheritance – characterized by malformation of the limbs. One result is oligodactyly, the opposite of polydactyly, in which digits of the hands or feet are missing. There is no "poster girl" for another condition: phantom limb phenomenon. This is the condition experienced by a majority of amputees, who feel sensations of movement and especially pain in their missing limb. For instance, someone who has lost an arm might feel as if his or her hand were balled up and the nails were digging into the palm. All of this leads up to a strange case from a couple of years ago brought to my attention on Reddit. A woman born with phocomelia had only three fingers on her hand. That hand later had to be amputated after she was in an accident. After the amputation of the hand, she sprouted a phantom hand complete with 5 fingers, including a phantom thumb and index finger that had been absent since her birth. Authors P.D. McGeoch and V.S. Ramachandran of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, write, "This suggests that a hardwired representation of a complete hand had always been present in her brain....The case powerfully demonstrates the interaction of nature and nurture in creating and sustaining body image."

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Medieval medical mummy

You are looking at the head and shoulders of a human preparation from the back. The top of the skull and the brain have been removed. "We did not think it was so antique," says researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France. In fact it is the oldest known preserved human dissection in Europe. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280. What is so extraordinary about that? Because the Middle Ages have been traditionally understood to be a fallow period in the history of human dissection. As I learned when I researched my book Dissection on Display, they fall between the 2nd c. attempts by Galen to extrapolate human anatomy by examining apes and other animals and the revolutionary thinking and hands-on approach of Vesalius during the Renaissance. The anatomical bust may not be as visually spectacular as these 19th c. specimens, but Charlier says, "It's state-of-the-art."

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